Please note: If you haven’t heard the original version of this very, very famous old joke before, it has been popular in Russia for decades, and there are many variants of it. You can witness an animated version of it on YouTube, and a pre-Mikhail-Gorbachev version is available to read here. This is an adaptation to reflect the ideological stupidities of the various Tory leaders of the last forty years.

Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan-Smith, Michael Howard and David Cameron are all travelling together in a railway carriage through the open countryside. Unexpectedly, the engine shudders and splutters, and the train grinds to a stop. They look at each other in consternation, and immediately start trying to work out how to get the train moving again.

Cameron suggests: “Let’s cajole the directors of the train company with a tax cut…

I’ve previously written a number of posts comparing Iain Duncan Smith to a serial killer, specifically Andrei Chikatilo, the ‘Russian Ripper’, who raped, killed and ate about 54 children and men before the Soviet Union’s finest caught and shot him. This is because of the immense death toll caused by his welfare reforms, amounting to an estimated three every four hours, coupled with his absolute absence of any remorse or willingness to concede that his actions are responsible for any kind of suffering and death. Indeed, he insists that they are right, merely based on his own ‘beliefs’. Worse, he is actually proud of them, absurdly comparing them to William Wilberforce’s campaign against slavery.

Well, if he wants to make that comparison, then the folklore of the various colonial peoples brutalised and exploited by their European conquerors, as well as the lower class European victims of forced transportation to the…

A few days ago, Mike over at Vox Political reported that attack on food banks, and the religious organisations that ran them, by Nick Couling. Couling is one of Iain Duncan Smith’s underlings over at the DWP. According to Couling, the rise in food banks was not due to an increase in underlying poverty. No! It was all due to Christian evangelisation, as the Christian charities and churches that run them attempt to use them as a tool for reaching out to the wider, secular community. Mike said in his article that it was a peculiar attitude to take, considering that RTU Smith himself strongly connected his welfare reforms in quasi-religious terms with his own Roman Catholicism. And going further, David Cameron managed to cause outrage at Easter by trying to give his ‘Big Society’ policies are religious justification, not least amongst Christians objecting to the Tories’ increasing impoverishment of…

I found this description of Iain Duncan Smith’s hypocrisy in orchestrating a reduction in state support for the poor, while doing all he personally can to gain as much of it himself in Guy Standing’s A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (London: Bloomsbury 2014):

Iain Duncan Smith, UK Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, has led a robust campaign against benefits for the poor and precariat, saying he is determined to reduce state dependency and end the ‘something for nothing’ culture. Meanwhile, his own state dependency dwarfs that of any of his targets. A trust run by members of his family has received over £1 million in EU agricultural subsidies in the past decade, in addition to the various tax breaks farmers receives, courtesy of an estate of 1,500 acres inherited by his wife. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is regressive, since the primary beneficiaries are large landowners…